Tuesday, July 25, 2017

KStars 2.8.0 is released for Windows, MacOS, and Linux

This is a minor bugfix release to increase stability of KStars on all supported platforms. Nevertheless, there were few significant updates:

Default NGC/IC catalog is now replaced by OpenNGC project. Christian Dersch compiled this catalog from OpenNGC. KStars now include more objects with accurate positions!

Lots of C++11/C++14 code migration work by GSoC 2017 student Csaba Kertész. This also included memory management clean-up, usage of smart pointers, valgrind suppression file and other fixes.

Adding support to selection of telescopes from Ekos equipment profile directly. This facilitates having different profiles when utilizing different telescopes on the same mount.

Michael Fulbright, KStars & INDI latest developer,
added the ability to have a scheduled refocus every N minutes during a capture sequence. Michael also added dither size in pixels and dither timeout to UI.

Many small bugs were fixed, thanks to our users who are making use of KDE Bug Tracking facilities effectively.

3 comments:

If this is the version released as part of KDE Applications 17.08, Wouldn't it be better to wait for the final release of KDE Applications 17.08? We are still at the RC phase. Please contact release-team@ for details.

No, 2.7.9 is the release that is part of KDE Applications 17.08 for Linux. The 2.8.0 release available for Linux is only available for users who are using the kstars-bleeding PPA. These users subscribe to the PPA to get rapid updates and bug fixes. For regular users in all distros, they get to use the release shipped with the official KDE Applications release.